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Day 4 started as an anticlimax. After all, who honestly would want to do nothing but lame academic business after one of the best nights in recent memory? There was happiness to be found, however, in my pride for P2 and their lavish treatment of their students. The day before, the P2 advisers offered me the option of coming to the office to register using the P2-only computer lab attached to the office. I happily accepted the offer and showed up at 9:00 AM to register.

There, I found a couple of cute surprises which weren't really so cute. As I registered for my Tutorial Course on America from the Outside, I discovered that my perfectly timed MWF afternoon course had become Monday only, 3:00-6:00. There was no way to change my P2 classes, so I sighed angrily and signed up for the remainder of my courses. My world lit produced a conflict with the only good remaining afternoon sections of American History After 1865, so I wound up taking that class at 9:30-11 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. All in all, here's my final courseload:

World Lit
Biology 301E (P2 Bio)
Logic and Modes of Reasoning
American after 1865
America from the Outside

15 hours. That whole mess of wrong classes probably could have been avoided had I taken calculus and Japanese instead. Oh well, too late now.

That was it. From that point forth, I now had the option to grab my stuff and leave whenever my little heart desired. There was two things, however, that kept me in Austin.

The first was Tarek. I promised him I'd give him a quick visit at his dorm room before I skipped town. After checking out from Jester, I drove up Guadalupe and parked my car in my favorite lot on the corner of 25th, and walked the rest of the way to Kinsolving where it took him a good 10 minutes to crawl out of his bed and come downstairs to meet me. I followed him up to his room, where his roommate still hadn't shown up, and we spent a few minutes there before heading up to a girls' floor to meet a couple of girls who were slightly hung over. Overall, nothing really special happened before Tarek had to go to an advising meeting and I was off on my own. What perfect timing, I discovered, as I checked my voicemail. Some 15 minutes before I left Tarek's dorm, I had a voicemail from Kinsey, predictably reason #2 to stay in town. We had agreed the night before to try to do lunch before I headed home, and she had called to say she was available. I talked to her while walking back down Guadalupe and eventually I decided to sit in my parked car, charge up my cell, and listen to John Mayer while waiting for her to come pick me up in her car. 15 minutes later, the wonderful black X5 appeared in my rear-view mirror and I jumped in. We quickly decided to head to a place called Shady Grove for lunch, a pretty basic hamburger place not unlike Chili's done Austin-style. The same kind of conversation that had happened all night the night before felt like it had picked up right where it left off. Lunch was over all too soon, as was the short ride through Austin streets back to my car. After one last goodbye, and an offer to hang out whenever I was in town, I hopped out and walked down the street to the Co-Op to get a chrome Longhorn decal to go on the back of my new car. A quick, painless, successful trip. I love shopping guy-style. In, buy, out, simple, easy, done. No room for bad things to happen.

I then climbed back into my car, feeling positively bittersweet. I didn't want to drive back to Arlington. Not just because driving home is always a bitch, but because leaving Austin for the place I still call home is such a pity. I tried to remain optimistic, however, as '3x5' accompanied my departure from downtown Austin and I hit the highway on the way home. The ride seemed to blur into a short 3 hours. Maybe because I spent the whole trip coming home at 85 miles an hour fighting off sleep as hard as possible due to a 4-hour nap constituting the rest I had been running off of. The optimism hasn't left me yet - I can't wait to head back, and not just for reuniting with my friends from this trip, or taking Kinsey up on her offer to see one another whenever I'm in town, but because I loved the life I led there. I was absolutely my own individual and it took me no time at all to start carving my niche. I had nobody to depend upon except myself and that pressure dissolved as soon as I came to the realization that I could trust myself.

So maybe I feel bittersweet now. Maybe, four days after arriving home, I'm still catching up on the sleep. It doesn't matter. I still am, and will be for the forseeable future, floating high on the thought of returning to that wonderful city, and those amazingly heart-breaking people, and reclaiming myself as I had long dreamed.

Day 3 became college life at its truest. Lots of awkward schedule pauses, lots of fighting with the bureaucracy, lots of unexpected setbacks, and yet some of the most fun I�ve ever had.

I felt a little more refreshed than I had after the first night�s sleep, having adjusted to the bed I was to be in. Breakfast was a bunch of those tasty little peanut butter crackers while walking to the P2 office once more for the first business of the day. Apparently I figured out whatever strategy there was to getting what P2 classes I wanted and ended up getting all three of my first choices:

-World Literature taught by Elizabeth Scala, an English woman that I met at the Honors Colloquium and should be thoroughly interesting. The theme of the yearlong course is love and so there are lots of works to be read that deal with it. All in all a good list of stuff to read.
-America from the Outside is a P2 Tutorial Course basically taught like a seminar. This one has a government / foreign policy slant and should be really mind-expanding.
-Logic and Modes of Reasoning. I got the giant class instead of the itty bitty section taught by an astronomy prof.

So the P2 session lets out and I realize this is my best chance to do all the stuff I have left to do: get my university ID, set up my computer account, and clear my issues with the health department regarding my immunizations. Expected setback: the Student Services Building is across campus. Unexpected setback: it�s raining.

With no alternative, I start the hike in the rain and take care of all that business with little trouble.

Well, just one problem.

I have a mullet in the picture for my university ID. The flash from the picture cast a shadow from my ears on the blue background. My hair was wet from the rain, so the shadow is the same color as my hair. The result: Blake has a mullet.

I spent the afternoon relaxing, enjoying the first bit of actual downtime I�d had in a while. Late in the afternoon, my wing went to dinner at a wing place called Pluckers.

If you go to Pluckers, ever, do NOT order anything beyond Medium. It�s impossible to eat.

I ordered Hot wings, which are just one step above Medium and yet only three stars on a five-star scale. I ate two and nearly exploded. I ate one more and I was sweating. I think I successfully downed five wings with the help of lots of fries and water and Dr. Pepper and whatever liquid was nearby and my mouth was on fire all the way back to campus for The Freshmaker.

The Freshmaker was another comedy routine put on by the OAs in the spirit of SNL. We found lots of UT jokes, and a few clever cracks at the other state schools thrown in for good measure. The Weekend Update ripoff was classic:

�Recent employment statistics show that employment for Liberal Arts graduates has improved dramatically in the years 2002-2003. In unrelated news, two new Wal-Mart stores have opened near campus.�

�Satan, the Prince of Darkness, has signed 149 new souls to his roster of Hell. In other news, 149 new students have been accepted to the Red McCombs School of Business.�

Finally, the third night was the amazement I had hoped college would be. It came in this little party split into two rooms: dance and karaoke. When I first arrived, the dance party was completely dead, but I found a cute girl named Bailey who was acting shy in this really cute way. Giving up on Bailey for the time being, I checked on the karaoke party, where I found Kinsey and Laura once more. Signups were starting to happen for Longhorn Idol, where they�d have five singers compete by applause and three audience-picked judges.

What the hell, I thought, and entered. I was to sing second. The first girl picked a song which she thought was by Christina Aguilera but really was a song from the 80s that Aguilera had covered. Whoops. Choking, she sat down and agreed to go last. So my turn came. Having nobody to follow due to singing first, I figured I had no chance of getting anywhere. No longer having anything to win or lose, I sang John Lennon�s �Imagine� just relaxedly, trying to keep a smile on my face just for the sake of being on stage.

�Imagine there�s no heaven��
A few people cheered from the audience. Maybe this isn�t so bad.

Some people ended up singing along, and others occasionally cheered at ends of lines. At one point I looked out into the audience to see people waving their arms back and forth slowly. What the hell, this is going well? So I got into it and finished the second verse. The karaoke god stopped the music and I sat down to cheers aplenty. That was way too much fun.

The remaining four people finished. A pair of guys hip hoppin� to Little Red Corvette did really well, then two guys were train wrecks on cheesy slow songs, and the final girl sang pretty well and got huge cheers for representin� Sugar Land. WTF.

Once that round finished, three people advanced to the final round. This was judged by applause. The top three were pretty clear winners. Thankfully, I was among them.

So we stood up for the second round, all three at once. Then began the OA running the competition:

�In this final round, you�ll all be singing the same song, and it�s already been chosen. It�s Like a Virgin.�

The title appears on the projector screen behind us and on the karaoke screen in front of us. Oh shit.

�When we point to one of you, you�ll sing until we point to the next person.�

So the song starts and they point to Sugar Land girl. My prayers were answered: everyone under the sun knows the chorus to this song and nothing else. So she does everything she can to improvise until they point to the hip-hop brothers. They barely get the words out over the laughter between the two. Then they point to me.

Quick, be funny. So I start singing bullshit in my best Brothers Gibb voice, strong falsetto and huge vibrato. I�m completely improvising trying my best to follow the change of the words from white to blue. It works. I can hear a few laughs over the sound of the song and my idiotic self on the monitors.

The magic finger points away from me. Thank God. Now do something new to not be stale. When the finger comes back, I eat the mic and start screaming the words in my best James Hetfield voice, throwing on a �yeeeeeh HAH!� on the end of every line for good measure. I can tell by the waning laughs that now it�s just getting stupid. Please, for the love of God, take that finger off me.

Finger goes away.

THANK YOU!

After what feels like ten minutes, the song ends and now we�re to be critiqued by a panel of three judges. None had anything to say. They chose their winners while the OAs yapped about the importance of class registration the next morning. Once the judges had arrived at their conclusion, they named off the second runner up. Hip-hop brothers.

I knew I was going to lose, since the one female judge on the panel was from Sugar Land and the other two guys probably thought the girl I was singing alongside was hot. Sure enough, I�m first runner up. I got a pen.

As I walked back to the dance party, I got lots of congratulations and �good job� remarks from various people in the audience. That was fun, at least. Kinsey made sure to point out that she sang along with me, which I thought was terribly cute for some unknown reason. I followed the two girls back to the dance floor, where it had started to pick up a lot. While the two of them danced together, I found my way back to Bailey, who apparently lost quite a bit of her shyness. The two of us spent twenty minutes dancing together until the party reached its end.

11:45 PM. Back in Jester. Whilst walking back, Kinsey and I had agreed to hang out again and go in search of coffee once more. I explained my emergency wing meeting to her (due to Pluckers taking way too long) and promised I�d be downstairs at midnight to head out with her.

Thus began the greatest point of frustration during my stay. Only four people showed up for the meeting, and two of them were idiots with A.D.D. who asked questions that our OA had just explained in his spiel. The 15-minute emergency meeting turned into a 45-minute walkthrough and I already had the process down. I wanted just to jump up and run out, while I stayed imprisoned in that Jester study room, praying she hadn�t left without me to go do something.

12:30 PM. I rush downstairs and find Kinsey right in the front having a friendly conversation with an OA about registration. As soon as that ends, I apologize for being a half-hour late and she says it�s OK as she had things to sort out. A potential four-some outing (consisting of the two of us plus Laura and my friend Mike, who will be explained in the appendix post) was ruined because Laura had to stay in and figure out her schedule. So by 12:45, Kinsey and I left alone and decided just to go for a walk around campus, figuring the coffee shops were all closed.

She and I walk a circle around campus in a continuous conversation that never hits any pauses or awkward stops. It just goes. And goes. Even as we find a spot with benches to sit down and talk, the conversation keeps going. That convo went on until 3:15AM, and as we walked upstairs to bed just like the night before, I felt the same thing I had the night before, but this time even more intense.

Day three ended with a smile on my face. Day four will appear soon.

Day two began with an unexpectedly good song. Robert had set his alarm radio to a popular local station that played mainly local artists. Some guy's good song woke me up and Robert quickly set about explaining the guy and his music (I think his first name was three letters and started with an S. Sal?) while I rubbed my eyes open. Today was to be a busy day. Thankfully, breakfast was covered courtesy P2. My friends and colleagues, never trust an honors program breakfast. I mean, Motel 6 could have beaten the crap out of the bagel and OJ combo that was served. But it was an unexpectedly good social opportunity. I got to know the handful of P2ers around me who I hadn't met in the office the day before.

"Hi, I'm Blake."
"I'm Kinsey. Nice to meet you."

After the requisite questions concerning her hometown and major, it finally clicked that I had thought this chick was cute. Apparently I hadn't been wrong. As the P2 group of 20 students split in half, she and I headed together to the meeting with the two academic advisers instead of with Dr. Woodruff, P2 head honcho Sadly, I don't remember my conversation with her or anything the advisers said. I think it was pretty basic stuff that absorbed fairly easily. Woodruff's meeting was a bit more pleasurable on all fronts. Woodruff gave us information on the P2-specific classes we were to take and gave us homework - we had 24 hours to browse some 30 courses and pick two to take. I even did some writing - Kinsey asked me for my email address which I happily wrote on the back of her advising manual. Woodruff took notice and stopped the orientation to ask if we were passing something around. Great. I've been orienting at P2 for about an hour and I'm already busted for passing notes with the cute girl. Looks like college is the kind of high school I always wanted to live. More on that later.

The afternoon was torture. It was spent with the College of Communication. There, they went over extremely basic information (though I spent the whole time chatting with a Sophie from New Mexico and receiving glares from the adults running the show) and then shipped us off to info sessions from various schools within the college. I chose to attend the Journalism meeting. What a mistake. I spent that retarded two hours wishing I wasn't in Communication at all and worrying about the fact that they scheduled me for an advising appointment that overlapped with a really important P2 thing where I'd choose which honors classes I'd be taking. Ultimately, I spent an extra hour there fighting with the Communication people to change my appointment and missing a lecture from Woodruff in the process. But with persistence and annoyance, and a healthy dose of sacrificing the shit you'd rather do, you can navigate the UT bureaucracy to get what you want.

That night was another assembly designed to sort of shock us into the UT ways of campus life. Except this time it had a guy get his backpack stolen after he left it, a girl was forced to have sex with her dumbass boyfriend, and some girl got really wasted. So basically, their point was 'Don't be stupid.' This assembly, and the session afterward where a large group discussed the issues inside a lecture hall, was a total waste of time. The whole time I just wanted to get out to go see the funny show being put on by the OAs.

The funny show eventually came around, and I really wasn't disappointed. It was called "Longhorn Is As Longhorn Does" and it was a dead giveaway that the show was in the vein of Forrest Gump. Forrest, this time around, was involved in accidents that gave UT most of its traditions. For example, people had been running around with little horns on their heads and tails on their asses to act like Longhorns until Forrest held up his pinky and index fingers and said with his typical slow-kid drawl, "I cut my fingers."

Late that night, around 11:00, there was free pizza for the whole dorm. Wow. Everyone showed up at the same time and I still hadn't made it in time for the pepperoni. So with my two pieces of cheese pizza, I sat down with my buds Mike and David, as well as Kinsey and her friend Laura, and eventually our favorite Thomas made an appearance. By midnight, the pizza was long gone and Kinsey was feeling adventurous. "I wanna go drive my car," she playfully whined.

"What do you drive?" I asked.
"An X5."

My eyebrows suddenly raised themselves and I too was in the mood for adventure. The whole crowd hung around for a while longer until a few people decided to go to their rooms. Meanwhile, Kinsey stood up as if she were ready to leave campus. I forget how it happened, but I had agreed to come on an adventure for either coffee or a cookie, whichever we found first. Laura surprisingly decided to disappear, leaving the two of us alone to adventure together. I wasn't entirely complaining. Heading to Kinsey's car, the conversation had already started. We were just talking. The topics weren't important as they sort of all meshed together. In short, we made a good pair for conversation.

Once in her brand new X5, ignoring the assistance of the navigation system, we headed to Guadalupe St. and cruised up and down it looking for coffee shops still open past midnight. Unsuccessful. But still a fun trip. The lack of coffee shops made our adventure quickly devolve into a tour of Austin, with this beautiful girl as my personal guide. I got to see 5th and 6th streets for the first time up close and personal - though they were completely dead on a Wednesday night during summer. As our tour concluded, I was the happiest I'd been in a long time. We walked back to the dorm, and up the stairs to our respective floors, and I gave her a little hug as she disappeared onto the second floor, and I continued on to the third with that feeling that you've just had the most refreshingly great night of your life and you wish you could live in the previous moment forever.

End of Day 2. Day 3 coming soon.

Wow. College has always been that ever-elusive idea in the back of my head, ever since my childhood days. I would see kids toss their caps and it never quite clicked inside my elementary school brain that those kids would run off to a university and become changed people. "And I still don't feel like I'm really here. I feel like I'm just in some part of Dallas that I've never seen before," I theorized to the Austinite Kinsey, my newest companion in the quest to find out what really happens after I tossed my cap back in May. The rest of the conversation was fuzzy, but I can very vividly recall the scene. I haven't figured out why, but I keep getting the feeling that that one scene is going to change my life. Maybe I've seen one happily-ending movie too many. But this week I'm living is the kind of stuff that makes for a happy ending. And plenty of room for a sequel.

The week of amazement began on Monday. Headed to Austin for UT orientation, knowing only that I should expect the unexpected. That strategy worked well. Not only was traffic the easiest I've ever had it, but I saw a couple people from my old Honors Colloquium clique and found out that my good amiga Jane also made her way to P2. Go Jane.

Having successfully parked, I made my way inside Jester Center to register. I found the line and jumped in as quickly as I could, hastily introducing myself to the girls in the back of the line. One said, "You can't stand in line with us. This is the girls' line." What the hell? She's right, this is all girls.

"Do you know where the guys' line is?"
"Um... way up there." She pointed toward the front of the girls' line. I headed up to the front of that line, to where the registration desks were 5 feet away instead of 200, and found a guys' line that lasted about 3 people. Registration easy. Like the line for the bathroom, we guys don't waste time. Now to get a roommate.

I stood in line at the housing desk, where the next fella to show up would be my roommate. The one who did show up was a guy named Robert who seemed pretty nice. Both of us had arrived early, so when we headed to our third-floor room we talked for a while and by the time I left I realized I was incredibly lucky to have this guy for a roomie. Robert was probably one of the only smart guys who wasn't a dweeb. He was Plan I / Linguistics and yet he had a very sharp knowledge of pretty much anything. And he still had a life. He nicely explained a lot of the more subtle facets of Austin life to me, things that would normally be learned the hard way. Probably saved me from a lot of future embarrassment.

The day began with a wing meeting. My wing was basically half the guys on my floor who were nearest me. We had a wing leader, a UT student who was working orientation. Those guys were known as Orientation Advisors, or OAs. Andy, my wing leader, was also a perfect fit for my personality. He was a junior in Comp Sci but he definitely had a life outside his work. He too was incredibly white. At the wing meetings we were either briefed on some of the processes we'd be going through, or we were just told what was going to go on that day. Here, we got a schedule layout. He explained the coming assemblies as if they were just assemblies - but oh no, they were full-out brainwashing.

The first meeting was a 'welcome' type of get-together (all 1000 students at my orientation) where important university figures emphasized the importance of actually showing up to class and breaking up with that one high school sweetheart. (Check...and..... check.) The brainwashing came in when they started teaching us cheers. Yes, I had been in Austin for three hours and I was already learning all the cheers that would be necessary at UT football games.

Dinner was barbecue, which left everyone who attended thoroughly unimpressed. Nearby, there was an organization fair, which left me thoroughly unimpressed. I wound up sitting in a comfortable chair and reading the newest issue of The Undecided (the P2 newspaper) cover-to-cover. Absolutely great stuff.

A digression. I had to be in the P2 office to pick up The Undecided. Only thing is, looking at my schedules, I have absolutely no idea when I would have been in the office on the first day. Tres creepy. What's more, for the sake of storytelling it's necessary that I mention now that when I did enter the office on day 1. The P2 folks made the freshman class the table setting for the big table in the main office. That is, underneath the glass, they slid the names, pictures, hometowns and majors of the entire freshman class. So I�m looking around, and I�m surprised at the number of attractive people in this class. I was expecting a large number of foreigners (read: non-caucasians) and nerdy people, and there were, but the remainder looked like normal people. That was good news, I thought. Then one person�s picture caught my eye. A cute white girl with brown hair who vaguely resembled Jessica Alba (or someone else on the WB, but I still think it�s Jessica). A Kinsey Schmisk from the Austin area, a double-major in Plan 2 and Business Honors. So she�s smart and kinda cute. I let out an �ooh� and Jane, who stood next to me whilst looking at the table photos, caught on and somehow figured out I noticed Kinsey�s picture.

�What, do you know her?�
�I�d like to.�

End digression.

After the BBQ, there was to be a small social party type of thing. I attended and quickly learned that the OAs (and many college students) are positively obsessed with DDR. Yes, this is when I knew I found the right university. I only played one song on the giant projection screen, but there's no better way to play the game. Oh, and Elbow Tag is the greatest coed game of all time. More on that later.

Afterwards, we all attended a required program on diversity. But it wasn't just racial diversity. They intelligently included sexual orientation as well as a few other kinks. The racial stuff was obvious - derogatory names bad, understanding cultural heritage and other sexual lifestyles good, etc. What threw me in for a loop was that several of the OAs would stand amidst the audience and give monologues about their ethnicities. Then one stood up and explained that he was gay. But what really broke my heart was when Julie, who would eventually be one of my favorite OAs, stood up and said she was HIV positive. "I know what you might be thinking. 'Who did she sleep with?' Well it didn't work out like that," she explained to a stunned audience, nearly crying. "It took only one time. One mistake, and I'm paying for it with my life."

I left with what's probably the most noticeable change in my character. I don't make as many racial cracks as I used to. UT's brainwashing was pretty successful in that regard - stuff like that is a really sensitive topic in Austin and it's impossible to say anything racial, funny or otherwise, that won't offend someone. As the evening began to turn to night, I happily discovered that the OAs were bringing the DDR setup into the TV lounge part of the lobby. That's how I got half of my campus semi-fame. I played for roughly 30 minutes on really hard songs and kinda impressed some people who had been seeing two and three foot songs all night. The next day, I remember meeting people and more than once being recalled as 'the DDR guy.'

And all this, everything you've just read, was Day 1. Day 2 coming soon.

With a new laptop, a new car, and a new way of life. The orientation writeup is on the way.